Re "In free agency we trust," Opinion, April 8 I'm desperately trying to hold on to the quaint notion that college athletes should be students first and foremost. Therefore, I applaud Mark Brilliant's idea of setting up a trust fund that spreads the wealth and yet is also tied in with academic progress. But he leaves out one group that profits most handsomely from the current system and never seems to have to pay for any of it: the owners of professional basketball and football franchises.

Joe Paterno shifts uncomfortably on the couch of his office at Penn State University and makes a confession about his holier-than-thou image. "It scares the heck out of me," booms the hallowed football coach. "Because I know I'm not that clean. Nobody is that clean." "I don't want to appear to be any more than I am," says Paterno, now speaking in a near whisper. "And that's a good, hard-working coach who is a decent guy, a family guy, who doesn't want to cheat." "I lose my temper sometimes.

The NCAA must be feeling a bit like Dr. Frankenstein these days: assailed by college football and men's basketball players who reject the NCAA's precious, but mostly mythic, notion that they are student-athletes. At Northwestern University, a group of football players scored a first-round victory before the National Labor Relations Board in a campaign to be recognized as "employees" eligible to unionize. For some college football fans, this evokes disturbing images of burly 18- to 22-year-old player-proletarians marching on picket lines instead of lined up on offensive or defensive lines, much less seated in classrooms.

Charles Yesalis said that an average of 14.7% of the males and 5.9% of the female athletes in all sports surveyed reported steroid use. A 1989 NCAA study based on self-reporting estimated steroid use at less than 5%. "This represents an upper bound, and for the first time there are boundaries and somewhere in between is reality," Yesalis said.

ARLINGTON, Texas -- NCAA President Mark Emmert said Sunday that unionizing students is a “ridiculous idea” to solving the problems of intercollegiate athletics. “It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics,” Emmert said during a morning press conference at AT&T Stadium. “There are some people who think that might be fine. I don't think that represents the views of anybody up here right now.” Northwestern football players recently received regional clearance from the National Labor Relations Board to unionize as they seek more benefits for student athletes.

The group behind the effort to unionize Northwestern athletes isn't interested in advocating for salaries for them. In a forum at the Aspen Institute in Washington on Thursday, College Athletes Players Assn. President Ramogi Huma refuted the notion that the group wants pay for play. “And that's not part of our agenda,” Huma said, according to the event's transcript. “That's one reason why we're here in Washington, D.C. This is not about salary.” Last month, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Northwestern athletes are university employees and have the right to form a union.

Northwestern football players qualify under federal law as employees of the university and, therefore, can legally form the nation's first college athletes' union, the National Labor Relations Board announced Wednesday. “We had both the facts and the law on our side,” Gary Kohlman, the attorney representing the players, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News. It's a stunning ruling, but hardly the final one on the matter. Northwestern has already announced plans to appeal the ruling by National Labor Relations Board regional director Peter Ohr to the full NLRB in Washington, D.C. After that, it probably will go through appellate courts and even the Supreme Court if necessary.

Electronic Arts Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Co. wanted to use the names and likenesses of college athletes in video games, according to an NCAA document unsealed in federal court Wednesday. The report was among hundreds of pages of documents that U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered to be made fully or partially public in the long-running antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA fronted by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon. The case is scheduled for trial in June and, in the interim, the document dump provides another window into the often contentious issues of amateurism and compensation raised by the case.

The news Tuesday that college athletes are seeking representation by a labor union brought a knowing smile to academics who operate far from the field house. The move by Northwestern football players to join the United Steelworkers union is unprecedented by college athletes, but old news among University of California system graduate student instructors. "We've been there, done that, and it works," UC Berkeley professor Harley Shaiken said. Shaiken teaches an undergraduate labor relations course called "The Southern Border," a class that contains 400 students and eight graduate student instructors.

For the better part of four years, former college athletes have been fighting in court to be compensated for the popular video games that bear their likenesses and jersey numbers. Now they have won a partial victory. On Thursday, attorneys for the players announced a settlement that will pay tens of thousands of former athletes -- if not more -- for games that included their likenesses dating to 2003. Even before the agreement, Electronic Arts had announced the discontinuation of its “NCAA Football” series. The amount it will now pay -- which was not disclosed -- must be approved by a judge.

SAN FRANCISCO - A video game maker has no 1st Amendment right to use the likenesses of former college athletes without their permission or compensation, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. Ruling on a lawsuit by former college football star Samuel Keller, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided 2 to 1 that game maker Electronic Arts Inc. was not protected by free speech rights because the video games "literally re-created Keller in the very setting in which he had achieved renown.

If you stop someone in the street and ask whether college athletes should be paid to play, the answer is likely to be "no. " Witness a recent Marist poll , which found that only 27% of the respondents felt that athletes deserved more than the scholarships and stipends they already receive. But the lawsuits brought by former UCLA hoops star Ed O'Bannon Jr. and other former college athletes raise a different question and may elicit a different answer. Should athletes receive a share of the money colleges make by selling their performances and likenesses to the media?